Thursday, September 15, 2011

How I Saved Dumbo

We recently took our three year old to one of those "paint your own ceramics" places on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I was excited about it, but I am so controlling when it comes to my own crafts projects that I knew it would be hard to let him go crazy with all the colors (i.e. paint outside of the lines). My husband had the great idea of only using one color at a time. Brilliant! We had a nice silvery grey dumbo in a short period of time. Soon, he had nice pink ears. But then, as our son got a little more comfortable in his surroundings, more and and more colors seemed to be appearing in his work space. He was up and back from the paint station every few minutes and dumbo began to look as if he had been in a paint fight.

It was torture for me seeing him with huge paint brushes, sloshing colors all around. There was little sign of our buddy Dumbo in the color swirl that had transpired. But then my husband had yet another great idea. He suggested I just paint in the eyes while my son was cleaning up. So I quickly painted in the eyes (and neck ruffle and toe nails....but who's counting?) and voila! Dumbo came to life. Granted he still looks like paintball dumbo, but that is great because my son really did paint him. I just added a few details and he was thrilled when he saw the changes. He truly LOVES his Dumbo bank (and so do I)!